I don’t have any pictures, because of course I forgot my camera, but the inaugural Toronto Girl Geek Dinner, held last night, was a resounding success! With just two weeks of pre-promotion, we managed to get 35 women out to hear Sandy Kemsley speak about her experiences as a woman in tech. Full details have been posted on the TGGD blog, and if you happened to attend and plan to post your pictures to Flickr, please tag them “TGGD” so we can all share.

In the interests of sustaining our momentum, we’ve booked the date and speaker for our next event, though not the location as yet (we’ll be looking for a spot that has a better layout for mingling and amplification as well as a buffet or something that will eliminate the food-related delays we experienced last night).

I don’t understand these “girl” tech clubs and why they exsist? With technology so genderless and agnostic why do we form such clubs that are exclusive to women? Isn’t this like Wired Woman? As a wired/geek woman for close to 20 years I never saw a reason to attend these things. Is there some ritual that happens at these events that men cannot take part of? Just curious?

Hi Julie – as you know, women are underrepresented in technology. There are lots of reasons for this, of course. The most important point here is that whenever you have a field that does not represent the full biodiversity of society in general, that’s bad. It’s bad because it means there are unaddressed barriers to entry and it’s bad because the field itself (technology) is not leveraging the full potential of the intellectual marketplace.

So what we’ve done is create an environment in which particularly younger women can come together with more seasoned professionals to network and learn about tech and business life, hopefully giving them an advantage as they move forward in their careers because there aren’t that many of them, and we want them to succeed and be examples for the next wave of young women, and so on…

Obviously this kind of thing is not for you – and no one’s saying there’s anything wrong with that, of course!

And in answer to your final question, yes – technology is agnostic and genderless. But, good or bad, people are not.